7 ms·

I know it's important to do science that comes to obvious conclusions, but sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for

• marcus_holmes 2y ago
  I have a friend who got lucky in his mid-30's and never worked again. He doesn't suffer from any of the symptoms described in TFA. I know its anecdata, but it seems to be borne out elsewhere. So yeah, I think what the authors are seeing is the effect of chronic poverty, not chronic unemployment.
  • raincom 2y ago
    what if chronic unemployment leads to poverty?
    • advael 2y ago
      Clearly there's some correlation between poverty and unemployment, but since we didn't do an RCT there's just no way to tell causality here
      • wakawaka28 2y ago
        No way to tell? Really?? It doesn't take a randomized controlled trial to know that there are more poor people who can't find work than rich chaps living on their savings or inheritance by choice.
        • advael 2y ago
          Yes, in our population samples people who have income from a job report feeling like they have more money than people who have no income from being long-term unemployed. But due the cross-sectional design of our study it's impossible to determine causality
          • wakawaka28 2y ago
            The point of my comment clearly didn't register. I'm not arguing any technical point about this study but the more obvious point that the more you work, the less poor you are. People who aren't looking for work usually aren't counted as unemployed, which would additionally contribute to the obvious outcome that working is inversely correlated with poverty. The causality (making money makes you less poor) is as obvious as rain causing wetness.
            • crooked-v 2y ago
              You're arguing with sarcasm.
              • advael 2y ago
                Who knows, it seems equally plausible that the argumentation lead to my posts being sarcastic in retrospect. There's just no way to tell these things!
  • advael 2y ago
    Aye, exactly that. Even as someone who loves to do a dumb research project, it's starting to irk me how much funding can apparently go into essentially studying the various detrimental effects of poverty in exactly the same ways and concluding "well clearly poverty correlates with [broadly defined bad outcome] but there's no way to determine causality here"
  • nradov 2y ago
    Unemployment is a specific term in economics which refers only to workers who don't have a job and are actively looking for a job. People like your friend aren't unemployed they just don't have a job.
    • marcus_holmes 2y ago
      Exactly. So the chronic effects that the study found are not linked to the lack of a job, but the lack of income that a job brings. Because people without a job but with money don't suffer those effects.
      • SoftTalker 2y ago
        This isn't complicated. People like the feeling of doing productive work. If you are independently wealthy, you can do whatever you want. Hobbies or volunteering, among other things, fill that need. If you are employed, you get that reward with your paycheck at least. Ideally the work itself is also rewarding, providing the satisfaction of doing something productive. This is why people can be happy doing rewarding work even if the pay isn't all that great. If you are unemployed and looking unsuccessfully for work, you have no income reward and no work accomplishment reward. If you receive unemployment benefits or UBI of some sort in that situation, it's more of a reminder that "you suck, you can't even find a job, everyone else has to support you" than anything rewarding.
        • marcus_holmes 2y ago
          > If you are unemployed and looking unsuccessfully for work, you have no income reward and no work accomplishment reward. If you receive unemployment benefits or UBI of some sort in that situation, it's more of a reminder that "you suck, you can't even find a job, everyone else has to support you" than anything rewarding. So you're saying that you think the chronic long-term effects found in the study are not from having little money, but from the lack of rewards? I mean, there's no data on that, so you could be right. We'd have to find a bunch of people who have little money but find their own rewards and see if they suffer the same consequences. Possibly the "starving artist" folks - people whose motivation is their art but who earn no (or very little) money doing it. Anecdotally, the ones I've met veer wildly (almost daily) between euphoria and despair. But I think that's different from the symptoms the study is talking about.
  • droptablemain 2y ago
    If someone is not working because they received a windfall it's probably better to think of them as "retired" rather than "unemployed."
    • gmd63 2y ago
      Definitely. To be classified as "unemployed" you have to be seeking work.
  • hluska 2y ago
    Keep in mind that they’re studying unemployment whereas your anecdote is about retirement. The article argues that unemployment leads to a loss of control which leads to certain significant attitude changes. It would be quite irregular for someone who received a career ending windfall in their mid-30s to feel a lack of control. There is a whole other can of angry cobras for them.
  • ericjmorey 2y ago
    Your friend isn't unemployed by definition.
  • kelnos 2y ago
    Yup, 100%. Certainly there are cases where people end up with some sort of windfall and retire early, and then end up disengaged and apathetic. I think those sorts of people have been so brainwashed by societal expectations that they can't imagine how they'd fill their days without 40+ hours of someone else telling them what to do all the time. Or, worse, they've bought into the idea that employment is some sort of virtue, and even though they don't need to work, not working makes them feel bad about themselves. I think if you were to look at the disengaged and apathetic unemployed among us, more times than not you'll find that their finances are tenuous at best, and more often in complete disarray. No money, in our society, means no prospects, and constant stress and anxiety around how you're going to simply survive, let alone do anything that feels "engaging". The problem is no money and lack of a social safety net. Unemployment is related, but it's far from the whole story.
• naming_the_user 2y ago
  For what it's worth, as someone who doesn't need to work on a daily basis (made enough in my 20s), extended periods of unemployment can quite easily lead me down a similar path to the one that the article describes. If you slip into a pattern of not waking up at a reasonable time, staying indoors and not exercising, not making attempts to socialise, etc, then it can be quite easy to throw your brain chemistry out of whack and spiral into what is essentially a form of depression. A job (or a business, partner, family, serious enough hobby, etc) forces you to do all of that, it sets you up with a basic framework, whereas if you are completely free from constraint no-one is going to tell you to get out of bed at 8am, 9am, 10am.... 2pm... Of course, if you're poor and unable to find work, then you have all of that _on top of_ the financial stresses.
  • AbstractH24 2y ago
    Since it sounds like you’ve been in and out of this, curious what advice you have for pilling yourself out.
  • wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
    I save 90% of my income, and work freelance. My experience may be unusual but it has been the opposite. When I have a job time blurs togethor. I stop drawing, and exercising and learning math. Pressure builds. Eventually I finsh and that stage ends and a rennaissance begins. I am only a clear deep thinker when unemployed. When I am captured by the salient sense of daily responsibility and income, mental exercise is at the bottom of my priorities and doesnt make the effort/reward payoff threshold.
    • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      Yep, I feel the same way. I focus on my music and feel far more satisfied when I’m not stuck spending lots of time on that sort of thing, which tends to make me feel tired and unmotivated all the time.
    • forgot-im-old 2y ago
      Same. Self motivation may be related to dopamine receptor rate and sensitivity which are a genetic trait.
• fsckboy 2y ago
  you bring up psychology, then completely botch it, just as the study did. >sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for topics like this...thus, people who are long-term unemployed likely feel that they lack control of their lives because this is true. you and the study are not controlling for people who feel they lack control of their lives tending to do a poorer job of finding work, and even doing a poorer job of keeping a job; people whose self esteem is more fragile being more likely to lose their jobs, reinforcing their negative self images: but that's not unemployment doing it (the study does hedge a lot by saying "associated" as if they are not suggesting cause). I'll bet if they had done a Big 5 Factor analysis of the samples in the study we would see lots of clustering, a much more interesting result than what the study found, and Big 5 Factor results are not known to change as the result of unemployment.
  • anigbrowl 2y ago
    It's equally plausible that employers treat people with particular trait cluster poorly, and that eventually they give up on getting abused.
    • robomc 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • ericjmorey 2y ago
        Probably more likely TBH
    • portn0y 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • WalterBright 2y ago
      Employees abuse their employers, too.
      • 2y ago
• orwin 2y ago
  I disagree with that. I know a handful of persons who are 'unemployed' in the sense that they don't work for money, and don't have money at all (most of them I met in a natural squat, NDDL, and some are still living the life at 40-50 in what is called 'ecolieux' in my country). They're still the happiest persons I know, even the two sober ones (no weed nor alcohol, for hippies, feel weird, but they have more time for music. And sex I guess). They still work for the ecolieux: prepare food, care for vegetables, fruits and poultry, odd jobs, but they aren't paid for it.